


Pu Qi Shrine

by Fallowfield



Category: Heaven Official's Blessing, 天官赐福 - 墨香铜臭 | Tiān Guān Cì Fú - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Genre: M/M, Pu Ji Shrine, Pu Qi Shrine - Freeform, Worship, hualian week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 13:57:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20583632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallowfield/pseuds/Fallowfield
Summary: Does the shrine take on the likeness of its god or does the god take on the likeness of his shrine?





	Pu Qi Shrine

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for Day 8: Worship of Hualian Week 2019!

Eight hundred years is nothing to the earth. Its rocks, its air, and even its trees have seen countless sunrises, changing from summer to winter, then summer again. It’s seen empires rise and crumble, the faces of countless kings growing old, then replaced with another. It’s dizzy with the motion of space and its endless twirling. An unknown feeling to humans, whose lives are only the length of a heartbeat, held within the elements surrounding them, their faces all beginning to run together. Their empires are nothing to the politics of the mountains and the oceans.

The trees once grew countless, and they never once thought beyond their own perfect architecture; deep labyrinths of roots, branches reaching for the sky. Those fallen by the winds, by a callous gust in their raging, only think of the dens and burrows, shelter found by chance. The animals find incidental uses for the trees, and they don’t mind.

But humans are more apt to peer and pry, and when they find a trunk of great heft and strength, healthy and full, they may pull out their axe. The tree becomes timber and is no longer a tree. But the nature of the universe, the ancient things know, is mutability, and how easy it can be to change fate, no matter what material into which it’s carved.

Every timber has potential to be built into a palace, hauled by a team of laborers, but it mustn’t forget that it can just as easily be built into the smallest and humblest of things, the work of one nameless pair of hands. But just as importantly, a shack can be anything underneath its ragged façade. It can be a home, a shelter, or even a shrine.

The work of humans can grow to have longevity, but only once in a great while. This shack was worn and battered already, though it was built so few years ago. The trees who breathed life into it, though, had seen a hundred, with thick trunks, pillars to the heavens.

But with four walls, the air shouldn’t be able to pry its fingers through the beams, with a sightline clear across. Without the hands of people, the building will deteriorate, collapsing under the weight of the years. The rain collects and eats it away, and grasses edge their roots into the wood. The sun fades away its deep color, whatever life of which it still boasted.

Rebirth was unknown to it, but the man in the simple white clothes posted the sign outside where its door had once stood. Then it was made into something it had never been before.

He was a man who did his best to remain unpresumptuous, but there was something about him he couldn’t conceal, like candlelight that somebody had hidden beneath a wicker basket. His hands were gentle and delicate, but an unmistakable strength shone latent beneath. Trees, in their persistent patience, are among the most observant of beings, and they don’t forget, even when cut.

Sometimes humility is its own light. Even the villagers, long made uncertain of the gods, were drawn to him, though he just labored there, unwashed, sweeping the dirt floor. Devotion lies in the soil. All glowing images are just adornment, built upon its back. They even offered him water chestnuts, a meek offering, but they were fresh from their own soil, that of their livelihood. Gifts of great transparence.

And he seemed just as simple, an image looking back at him from still water. Yet it was a reflection, a mirror he’d erected in front of his face. But he spoke bluntly, posting his sign. _“This monastery is dilapidated. Sincerely seeking benevolent people to donate in order to renovate it. Accumulate merits and virtue.”_

The shrine did not take it personally. It was a mirror of the god himself, no matter how many he placed to obscure his face. Even the most powerful can tumble, threadbare, but with care, they can return to glory.

Shrines are humble, anyway. They sit and listen without judgment, a confession box, holding all the hopes, the dreams, the remorse of the visitors until it can be relayed to the god. Nobody sees the shrine. It is nothing, only a vessel, a receptacle. It cannot sit with the worshipers and hold back their hair, wiping away their tears. But it does don the face of a god and act as their hands. A rain barrel now, to hold all these tears, but then can pour them out in the drought. When a body does not pursue renown of its own, it gains the capacity to hold such in its hands, to be so close to its presence, and to come to know it well.

All that, but then it sees the god, before his great constructions, or in spite of them, without all the pomp and circumstance, unrolling his mat to go to sleep. It holds his head there upon the earth under the weight of its atmosphere. It sees him pick the dry crusts off his bun, then take a bite. It sees him count, and scratch his head to think, trying to remember. Small moments. He was once human, too, even if eternities ago.

What else on earth can claim it housed a sleeping god, keeping the rain off his face, chosen above all other floors he had walked? It has the privilege to labor against the winds to keep his breathing soft and even, his candles lit in the worst of storms. For this god, seeking followers, who would rather remain faceless than paint his own upon the wall.

But then there was another, who couldn’t stay away. He smiled with a great light, not of heaven, but of hellfire. Heaven and hell both shine brightly, but are always placed at odds, fated to be foils. They never find themselves on the same level, the sun and the moon, one in the arms of the other.

The man in red rose early and sat in front of this shrine and painted and painted, crinkling and throwing several pages away. A being of such great power, yet it knelt on the ground in front of such an unassuming spectacle. Not a spectacle at all. He was a being of devotion, perpetually treading its path. Devotion was so common to him that it lays ahead like autumn leaves, small crunches made beneath his feet. Not to speak of how it flies around his head, tumbling from the treetops. Devotion couldn’t be enough for him. They say when the road is paved with gold, it means gold’s value has been lost, less even than the air needed to breathe. It couldn’t be common. It couldn’t be garden variety. It had to be unparalleled, or else it couldn’t convey what he wanted to say. No material of this earth could ever capture the likeness of his beloved or express the depth of his zeal.

Inside every mountain is a sword waiting to be forged. There is something to be said for the pressure, of the melting, of the agony. When it lifts and one doesn’t dissolve from the shock, the soil enters the kiln and emerges as stone, as metal, infinitely stronger than before. The shrine can only boast of a passive fealty, but this being had been tested to the point he’d been imbued with an intense magnetism, a fervor that would send him to the ends of the earth. How could the earth hold such works of heaven and of hell outside their gates?

But here he was, unkempt hair, ink staining his fingers, knee deep in devotion, devotion caked on his clothes. The shrine watched him, wordless, the curtain fluttering in the breeze. He could feel its gaze on his back. But he didn’t mind. He was tired of being alone. It was like him, in a way. The beams had once grown from the dirt, the devotion grasping upward, feeding them, and now devotion was what was eating away from within. Could it feel envy? That a being full of motion and words could attempt to know its god more than it did? But when had this god exchanged hands? What could speak at all, especially without a voice, when he already had shackles of his own, heavy with a distant place? Regardless, this man in red stood, frowning and brushing away his errant strands of hair, and gazed down at his work. He resisted the temptation to tear it up yet again. Nothing would be perfect enough to be a mirror of his intended.

Hua Cheng had carved that likeness thousands of times, but nothing compared to the real thing. There was no material that could ever match his grace, but it was good that he hadn’t forgotten that. His beloved wasn’t so high on a pillar that he could no longer see him. He’d studied until he’d had the patience of the trees, and he could look at him as his shrine did.

Part of this was that, when one looked closely, Xie Lian did have imperfections. Scars across his skin, callouses on his hands, dirt in the creases of his arms and under his chin. But they were cached treasures, only the most ardent explorer would know where they were. The imperfections Hua Cheng had been afraid to carve were what made gege so perfect, and part of why his work always fell short.

Regardless, many were concealed. His pen had always flowed seamlessly from graceful chin to throat to flowing fabric. He could paint with his eyes shut. The gentle face surrounded by more and more regalia. His offerings to him, if only in ink. What kind of worshipper obscures him with objects of less glory, and doesn’t know every inch of his god? But what worshipper assumes he is worthy to see such things? Even a glimpse from afar was gazing into the sun, the glory remaining pinned to his eyelids.

But the shrine knows. The stream does. The trees do. This god allows them to, just undressing every night and dressing every morning, unraveling miles and miles of silk cloth. What sort of god continues to live, descended, as a human?

This man in red lived descended, too. Still, he was afraid to touch, the skin on his thumbs becoming so impossibly rough, and he wanted to pull away. He knew the path of the shrine, gazing up at where his god had just flown and waiting until he came back. But here he was by his side, that face he’d studied gazing back at him, alive. When it was concern flashing on his face, that flicker of guilt fluttered in the air again.

But the shrine tucked them away, hidden from the swaying woods and the watching cliffs. The candlelight held them in its palms. Xie Lian smiled, then grasped San Lang’s hands, slowly guiding them back to him. All the _dianxias_ he’d known for so long had been made of ink or stone, but this one was made of golden clouds, warm sunlight, and breezes lifting him up.

It was only in _Dianxia_’s presence that confidence ever faltered, but it was only in _Dianxia_’s presence he ever felt fulfilled. Each day Hua Cheng could see more and more of his god, each day the cord between them slipping looser and looser. But he could never see the deepest recesses behind his eyes and in his ribs.

But the shrine could, and what Hua Cheng didn’t know was that he had nothing to fear. What made its god happy made the shrine whole. So there it stood, rotting pillars. It may be rotting forever, but it didn’t matter as long as it housed its treasure. As the old saying goes: _Body in the abyss, heart in paradise._

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Twitter @fallofield!


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